beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings
by all these ghost towns
Summary: Because when it comes to punishment, no one's a bigger glutton than him. Or, the fall of Loki's empire.


**A/N:** Who even knows? This is way in the distant future, and is full of wtfery, and can be read as a companion fic to _unlearn the ways of your mad, glass world_, but doesn't necessarily have to be.

But the similar elements between the two are implied, and heavily so.

Title comes from "Cosmia," by Joanna Newsom.

x.

in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it, but then give it back.

**- Charles Bukowski**

.

Truth be told, there are times in which Loki allows himself to fall heavy and ignorant to the lure of the texture of Sif's skin.

It's an old, callous institution, victimized by the need of his nature, and one he hadn't ever expected to categorize within the realms of reality. Because – if he were being honest, and why wouldn't he be? – it's something he had never rationally believed to be on this side of possible.

But it did happen, and it continues to happen, and Loki grits his teeth and shoulders all of the lunacy and loss of control that comes from his need to pull her clothing from her skin, and his name from her throat.

There are things about Sif – this woman he's known since his days as a boy; known since long before he knew what to call the stirring of feeling that arises within him in her presence – that Loki likes to trick himself into believing are meant only for him.

(For lies and trickery are staples of his being, and acts of valor that are so very much his own.)

These little nuances about her Loki shelves amongst his possessions with falsity, but still satisfies himself with the quietness of their spread.

He will take what she gives him, and he will take and take until his ambition spills out and lays dry at her feet. He will take and he will pilfer things from her as she's willing to bestow; it's a system of classification that churns with his self-effacing sincerity.

Sif has these small, unguarded moments – that Loki thinks he may own – where she turns her lips into her teeth and eyes him in a way that makes him feel young; younger – so very much younger than all of the years he has piled onto his frame.

In these moments – these soft, exposed moments – he always brings his fingers to the inside of her wrist and counts out the beats of life that she spends willingly at his side. It makes him want to unravel her like a spool, and section her off into compass lines that make for fair travel; sections that Loki likes to believe that he can navigate surely himself.

It's a reverent thing, and one much too weak to be considered appropriate for mention at all.

It makes him susceptible.

Because she is present and she is bright and looming, and it makes him stagger his thoughts across wider expanses, so he can employ more time in understanding the veins on her neck, the shade of her lashes.

He thinks about the shape of her ribs as she arcs herself over him. He thinks about the stretch of muscle from the back of her knee to her heel, and wants to taste the way it contracts against his back.

And of course she is beautiful; she always has been, even with bleeding knees, and yellow hair, and a brash mouth ill-fitting a girl. Oh, but she is so beautiful, and magnificent, and he can feel it in rhythm of his blood: a shaking, encompassing thing. She is lovely and entire and fragile and she will never be his to keep: this he knows.

Sif shifts like a current, liquid and unbidden and continuously outsmarting his reach of forever – if he were to allow himself to believe in such meaningless notions as time.

Loki knows that time, as it stands, doesn't stop to notice changes; it doesn't stop to console the children of its ages; time is too busy, too concerned with constantly propelling things ever forward to take care of those who suffer its indifference. This is a lesson Loki had first learned when he was old enough, gifted with centuries enough to know that time, for them – for these people he thought his own – stretches continually and brutally in long, unblinking years. It's a lesson that continues to beat its lectures against the insides of his skull until he becomes indifferent to its pull, and the meaning of eternity falls wayward and useless to the dust at his ankles.

Loki doesn't think about things in terms of time anymore; if it can't take notice of him, why should he do anything but the same? So it is useless to try and contain his actions and thoughts and wants into labeled durations. But Sif? Sif is siphoned off into measures, and she is very aware of the heaviness in the language of Forever and For Now, and her certainty, her preparedness, instills in Loki things like affection and fear, which blend together to make hollow, unfriendly bedfellows.

He cannot fathom a future that is whole; he cannot begin to imagine a being of exactness in which Sif – with her bravery and her full mouth – is ever insistent upon a continued, unbroken existence next to him; _with_ him. But Loki's blood is still under her fingernails now, and he lets it sit like a claim, like it's something he has any right to believe.

Though there is nothing _to_ believe, because this will end, it is a quantifiable, indisputable fact. Within all the realms he has frequented, all the beings and peoples whose knowledge he has exhausted, the termination paradigm is one constant that is blaring and unabashed in its certainty.

It will end: this entity of LokiandSif, SifandLoki; this fabrication of togetherness – however undisclosed – and he knows this like he knows the weight of indecision, and the smell of death caused by his hand.

But thoughts aimed backward make him feel lesser than whole, so Loki trains his mind far from the past, far from _his_ past, tainted with all of his fractured purpose. Because when he lets himself teethe on the ill-conceived sanctity of his offenses, a haze settles into his vision, blurred with everything he thought he knew, and everything he once rallied himself against.

It makes him swallow a bit too heavily to make room for all the things that taste like remorse.

It leaves him drifting in and out of recollections of days he doesn't remember living.

The past, with its emptiness of quantity, burns him like a sickness; and that's the thing, Loki thinks, he's always been full of sickness: variations on the same, repetitive cue. All of these illnesses are poisoned inside him, and he has to shut his eyes against the cold-fingered memories with fists in his skull.

Loki swallows and readjusts himself against the malignity of his thoughts.

Sif's head is heavy on his elbow and he uses his other hand to walk his fingers down the knobs of her spine. The counting and weighing of the realness of her anchors him, and yet, even the candor of this simple action makes him query a new breed of ailment that finds itself imbedded in his chest.

Loki pulls his fingers through Sif's hair – a darkness and heaviness attributed to his doing (another thing he wrongly thinks he may own) – and wonders idly, in this fit of pleasure-driven madness, after Thanos's sword had left a hole in his chest, if his skin had mended and reformed itself around something shaped in her honor; because try as he might, she sticks in his bones and buds in his flesh.

If Loki would let it, it would grow till it choked the life from him: this new sickness. And that is not something that he can rectify with words from his tongue; not when those words are so laden with things that could ruin.

If he lets himself, he would understand, but Loki's never been one for ease; it has always been a repetition of breaking and restitching, a pattern that's nothing but heavy-paned and colored deep.

And if he lets her, she will gut him and cut her teeth on the truth that wraps in his bones. She is not Mercy; she is not Pardon, and he will fall heavily before the blade of her tongue.

Loki exhales and a few hairs near Sif's ear flutter with his effort. The arm he has wreathed around her tightens a bit as she stirs. For, despite what he knows, he always resists her departure, balks at her leaving, even though it is as inevitable as the rise and fall of the sun, and the coming of the end of days.

"Stop your insufferable thinking, you will corrode your mind; and then what have you to offer?" Sif asks, breaking into his thoughts and the dark air of his room with her sleep-thickened voice.

Loki's mouth curls wickedly against his will as he thinks of all the things he can offer her. He places his lips to the nape of her neck with a promise of those things, and drags his hand down the plane of her stomach.

Sif arches against his teeth on her neck, and presses back on him while he shudders in turn, willing her to continue to turn away, so that all that is written with traitorous clarity on his face: weak and vulnerable and unneeded – _unwanted_ – can remain silent and unread.

He breathes thickly around a density in his ribs, and hooks his fingers in her with a gentleness that is merciless and wrong.

And this is _all_ wrong, he knows. It is wrong and it is incurable and it is doomed.

Loki considers himself many things; foolish isn't one of them. But this love, foolish and misplaced – heavy and unspoken on his tongue – is rotting his teeth.

He can feel it staining his skin.

.


End file.
